Back in May, Tony Abbott lost his seat of Warringah to Zali Steggal after holding it for 25 years. The country said goodbye to our patron saint of eating onions like a weirdo, but he wasn’t officially farewelled from the Liberal Party until last night.
About 1000 people piled into a dinner to honour Abbott and his career, including people like John Howard, Alan Jones, Peter Dutton, and Gladys Berejiklian.
Abbott spoke last for the evening, telling the evening “I used to think that the Abbott government was a remarkably underappreciated one.”
“The great thing tonight is that finally I think it might be seen for what it really was — a good-faith effort to help our country to be the very best it could be.”
The best it could be, huh? Let’s take a walk down memory lane.
Remember when Abbott told Alan Jones (a dude who has used the n-word on air) all about how much he hated wind farms? The actual quote was “I do take your point about the potential health impact of these things. When I’ve been up close to these wind farms not only are they visually awful but they make a lot of noise.
Or the seemingly thousands of times he decided to use his position as Prime Minister to bang on about how much he was against same sex marriage. A few years later, during the marriage equality survey (ugh) he told everyone that if you hated political correctness to vote no. Even his own daughter called him out on that one and went on to be a part of an ad for the yes campaign.
People who love each other getting married: not fine.
Or the time his government spent $4 million creating an anti-asylum seeker movie to show overseas, because he was hell bent on stopping the boats. But if a boat did manage to get through, they’d be sent to Nauru – a place Tony reckons is a “Very, Very Pleasant Island”.
There are so many more gaffes and straight up awful quotes that came out of the years that Tony Abbott was Prime Minister, and it genuinely boggles my mind that the way he’s decided to describe the time is “remarkably underappreciated”.
As for Scott Morrison? Well, Abbott reckons he saved the party “from being judged by history an embarrassing failure.” I’ll check in with you again in a few years about that one.